The Note II may be bigger and faster but it has some huge trade-offs. For one it is essentially impossible to use one-handed, and because it's so large and Samsung continues to use ###### plastic, it's much more likely to slip out of your hand. The keyboard is absolutely atrocious despite its size, and handwriting recognition only goes so far.

You will almost certainly be inconvenienced by the size of the Note II, and for an extra 0.2 GHz in processor speed it's just not worth it unless you are specifically after the S-Pen/S-Note features.

BTW these opinions come from someone who has used both for reviews (I currently have a Note II so look out for a full review shortly)

I got the Note 2 and am loving it. It's rocket fast, I mean really blisteringly so. I do have a few issues however:

1) TouchWiz - I PERSONALLY hate touchwiz, it ruins android, making 4.1 look like 3.22) ROM support - currently not found a decent AOKP rom for it yet that supports the pen3) Pen - The case I use has a magnetic lock, which affects the pen. That said, I barely use the pen

Overall, I love it though! The size is NOT an issue. Everyone who had held it has said things along the lines of "Wow, it's actually really comfortable".

Let me address the below comments:

The Note II may be bigger and faster but it has some huge trade-offs. For one it is essentially impossible to use one-handed, and because it's so large and Samsung continues to use ****ty plastic, it's much more likely to slip out of your hand. The keyboard is absolutely atrocious despite its size, and handwriting recognition only goes so far.You will almost certainly be inconvenienced by the size of the Note II, and for an extra 0.2 GHz in processor speed it's just not worth it unless you are specifically after the S-Pen/S-Note features.

I use it one handed all the time. Moreover, there is a keyboard option to shift it over to a more "thumb accessible" mode for people with girly baby hands It is plastic, yes. And crap plastic at that. But I NEVER use a phone outside of a case anyway, so it bothers me very little.The handwriting recognition has blown me away, how it reads my hasty scrawl is beyond me, but it does.But yes, the stock keyboard (part of TouchWiz?) Is crap

For ROMs, take a look over on XDA-Developers. There's already a beta of CM10 (Unofficial) available; this early days yet though. Personally, I like TouchWiz, and any non-TW ROM's are going to be missing all the lovely S-Pen features...